Which News Sites Have the Most Keywords in Common with eHow?

eHow is back in the news after claims it was hit hard by latest expansion of Google’s Panda update and subsequent denials from Demand Media. Articles like “How to Pour Water Into a Glass Cup” make it difficult to dispute eHow’s reputation as the poster child of content farms. But in terms of keyword targeting, how different is eHow from major news sites?

To get a rough idea I used SEMRush to look at the sites that have the most keywords in common with eHow. SEMRush’s “Competitors in Google” report ranks a site’s competitors by the number of keyword phrases for which both sites appear in Google’s organic search results.

So at a very basic level the more common keywords two sites share, the more similar they are at least in terms of keyword targeting.

I exported the first 10,000 results from SEMRush and went through the first few thousand looking for major news sites, primarily newspapers, national and local news organizations and online news sites. Then I added in a few major tech news sites to round out the list.

Here are the 50 news sites with the most keywords in common with eHow, according to SEMRush:

Domain

Rank on SEMRush List
of eHow Google
Competitors

Common Keywords
with eHow

1

nytimes.com

46

107049

2

usatoday.com

62

80881

3

cnn.com

76

69325

4

huffingtonpost.com

142

41303

5

bbc.co.uk

162

36867

6

guardian.co.uk

164

36729

7

businessweek.com

192

32584

8

dailymail.co.uk

195

32169

9

abcnews.go.com

210

29848

10

latimes.com

219

29164

11

telegraph.co.uk

231

28262

12

examiner.com

271

24859

13

engadget.com

275

24726

14

sfgate.com

277

24564

15

cbsnews.com

292

23374

16

forbes.com

300

22209

17

washingtonpost.com

303

21909

18

gizmodo.com

312

21464

19

usnews.com

336

19915

20

wsj.com

338

19763

21

time.com

374

18046

22

foxnews.com

385

17636

23

timesonline.co.uk

412

16523

24

patch.com

413

16498

25

mashable.com

425

16143

26

bnet.com

428

16132

27

boston.com

444

15643

28

npr.org

468

15037

29

arstechnica.com

504

13922

30

independent.co.uk

527

13411

31

reuters.com

563

12585

32

slate.com

699

10624

33

techcrunch.com

717

10417

34

indiatimes.com

757

9863

35

cbslocal.com

777

9609

36

oregonlive.com

779

9594

37

bizjournals.com

787

9540

38

chicagotribune.com

871

8640

39

businessinsider.com

917

8281

40

csmonitor.com

1070

7189

41

post-gazette.com

1151

6653

42

aolnews.com

1316

6003

43

dallasnews.com

1368

5822

44

gawker.com

1510

5282

45

newsweek.com

1578

5092

46

readwriteweb.com

1623

4968

47

sun-sentinel.com

2081

4015

48

timesunion.com

2089

4004

49

economist.com

2777

3072

50

msnbc.com

3657

2357

The New York Times tops the list with more than 100K keywords in common with eHow. It was #46 on the overall list of competitors. It should be pointed out however that with over 10 million nytimes.com pages in Google’s index the keyword overlap represents only 1% of NYT content.

USA Today and CNN also have considerably more common keywords than the other news sites on the list. The top 10 all share 29K or more keyword phrases with eHow.

What kinds of keywords do the news sites have in common with eHow?

Here are some of the terms shared with The New York Times:

Kind of an odd mix, but I spot checked the terms and both sites do surface in my Google results. In looking at the shared keywords for several sites, the commonality stems from both evergreen content on the news sites and news content on more general topics.

An important thing to point out however is that shared keywords do not necessarily mean shared quality. Just because some news sites are covering similar topics to eHow does not mean the quality of the content is the same.

That said Google is surfacing both the news sites and eHow for related search queries.